Tethered

by L. D. Davis

  “That’s not what I meant,” he held up a defensive hand. “What I meant was that you may have to show me how you do it. Wait. That doesn’t sound right either.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I started to smile. He wasn’t faking the underlying nervousness and he looked genuinely sorry and a little embarrassed for saying all of the wrong things.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, putting a hand on the back of his neck. The suit looked ready to tear at the seams where his muscles bulged out of his arm.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I get it. You’re a baseball player, not a model. Is that right?”

  “Right,” he smiled softly, showing off straight, pearly white teeth. Dimples appeared in his cheeks and I think I may have sighed. “Unlike Jeter over there. He loves the cameras.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I assured him. “If I think that you’re not, I’ll correct you. We’ll have fun with it, okay?”

  “Fun I can do,” he said, nodding.

  “Hey,” I said getting an idea. “Do you have any gum?” I patted his jacket pocket in search for gum.

  He looked at me in confusion for a second before reaching into his pants pocket. He produced a whole pack of strawberry Bubbalicious.

  “I haven’t had this gum since I was like twelve.” I grinned as I tore it open. I jammed piece after piece into my mouth until I had a pretty nice size wad against my cheek. Jerry looked at me as if I was crazy, and I worried that he actually believed it.

  I turned my back on him and looked over my shoulder. “Come stand behind me, Jerry. Hurry.”

  He did as he was told, though he still looked very confused and maybe a little bit more nervous than before.

  “Put your hands on my hips. Hmmm, no lower. Great,” I said.

  Just as the producers and photographers started giving direction, I held the bat low and at an angle. I grabbed my crotch and put a nonchalant look on my face. When they caught site of us, they back peddled and demanded gum for more of the girls.

  “Wow,” I heard Jerry whisper behind me, and I grinned around my large wad of gum.

  *~*~*

  “You set the pace for the whole shoot,” Jerry said in awe later in the day after I was back in my street clothes.

  “That photographer really likes to shoot edgy stuff,” I said with a shrug. “If he was another photographer, I may have taken a different approach, but then there are some who want you to pose a certain way and look a certain way without trying anything crazy.”

  “Sounds like you really know your stuff.”

  “I would hope so after ten years.” I adjusted my bag on my arm. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

  “Wait,” he said, stopping me as I turned to go. I looked at him expectantly. “You robbed me of my gum and you’re just going to walk away from me?”

  “You want a dollar to cover the cost?” I asked, reaching into my jeans pocket.

  “No,” he scoffed. “I want dinner.”

  “You want me to buy you dinner?” I asked, cocking my head to one side.

  “You’re really good at modeling and being obtuse,” he said with a grin, showing me those dimples again.

  “What are you good at?” I challenged.

  “Homeruns,” he said, puffing out his chest.

  I stared at him blankly. “I don’t follow football.”

  “Damn, you’re adorable.”

  “I know,” I said, batting my eyelashes dramatically. “Anyway, thanks for the gum, Jerry. Have a good one.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” He gently grabbed my arm again and pulled me back. “You owe me dinner for stealing my gum and grabbing your crotch in front of me. Usually I at least get a dinner before any of that happens.”

  “You really do want me to buy you dinner?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, I’ll buy you dinner, but you have to eat it.”

  “I’m a model, Jerry. I don’t eat.”

  “You know you’re breaking my poor heart, right?” he asked, putting a hand to his chest.

  “Do you just want to take me out to dinner because you want to fuck me?” I asked with a sigh. “It’s best to just get your intentions out in the open right away. That way you won’t waste my time or yours.”

  His eyes widened and he looked surprised by what I said, but he didn’t back down and he didn’t wipe that smirk off of his face.

  “Look, I know I’m an attractive guy and maybe you would like to get some of this, but I just want to take you out to dinner. But if all you want to do is fuck me because I’m a baseball player, I’m afraid I must decline.”

  I looked up at him thoughtfully. “You really only want to take me to dinner?”

  “Just dinner,” he said with that soft smile.

  “Okay,” I conceded after a moment. “Can I at least go home first and wash all of this hairspray out of my hair?”

  He turned halfway and reached for a hat off of a table behind him. He put the Phillies hat on my head, and pulled the bill down low over my eyes.

  “Nope.”

  I giggled and pushed the hat up some.

  “Okay, hot shot. Let’s go.”

  He offered me his arm. I looked at it stupidly before I realized what I was supposed to do. I was so use to the men in my life just taking me by the hand and leading me around.

  I slipped my hand into his arm and we walked out of the building.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “So, what’s your story?” Jerry asked me over a table full of food.

  “What story is that?” I asked, picking up a French fry slathered in cheese.

  “The story about why you are single.”

  “Does there have to be a story?” I asked after I swallowed my fry. “Maybe I just like being single.”

  “Maybe that’s a load of BS. Come on, give it to me.”

  “Why are you still single?” I asked defensively.

  “Because I’m not sure if I’m the settling down type,” he answered¸ looking me square in the eye.

  “So, you like sleeping around?”

  “I don’t sleep around. I find a girl who I can share my time with, but I don’t commit.”

  “Sounds a lot like sleeping around to me,” I said.

  “I don’t commit but I don’t cheat. Does that make sense?”

  It did, because I had that same relationship with Benny once. “Yes, I understand,” I nodded. “So, why don’t you commit?”

  “You know I asked the question first.”

  I waved a hand dismissively. “Whatever. Why don’t you commit?”

  “I have a very busy schedule when I’m in season,” he explained. “I travel a lot for games and if I’m not traveling I’m practicing. If I’m not practicing I’m sleeping. The women who stick with men with a schedule like that are rare, and I haven’t found one yet who understands. She may say she understands, but you know I’ll give it a trial run and usually after a few weeks I start to hear the whining and badgering about not being home.”

  “I can relate to that,” I said after a moment.

  He raised an eyebrow at me as he prepared to take a bite of his mammoth cheeseburger.

  “Really,” I said. “My career has been slowing down some lately, but in the past I was never in one place for very long.”

  “So, is that your story then?” he asked after chewing and then thankfully swallowing.

  “Basically,” I answered. I didn’t want to go into details about Emmet.

  “So, if you dated a guy with a similar schedule, you could deal with it?”

  “I think I could understand it. I can’t sit here and say that it would be easy, because I don’t know. I’ve only been on this side of the equation. For all I know, I could find myself in that situation and be a total lunatic about it.”

  Jerry wiped his mouth with a napkin and stared at me for a long time. I wasn’t one to feel self-conscious about myself or my body, but his direct gaze made me shift a little in my seat.

  “That’s the most honest ans
wer I’ve ever heard,” he said. He now looked at me with admiration.

  “Well, don’t get all mushy about it,” I said, sitting up straight. “It’s just a conversation. I’m not going to marry you and bare your offspring or anything.”

  “Until you can predict the future, don’t count me out,” he said with a wink.

  Our conversation was lighter after that. We talked through our meal and through dessert and coffee afterward. We must have spent a good three hours in that diner, but Jerry tipped the waitress well for taking up her table time. When we stepped out into the cool night air, I fumbled with the scarf around my neck, trying to tuck it in just right to help keep me warm.

  “Oh, you’re hopeless,” Jerry said with a smile and gently knocked my hands away.

  He rewrapped my scarf and tucked it into my coat and then pulled the bill of the cap down over my eyes again. Giggling, I pushed it back up so I could see him.

  “Can I hold your hand?” he asked, like he was asking me what the temperature was.

  “What?” I asked dumbly.

  “Did I not speak clearly?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said and then shook my head. “I mean no. I mean, sure. You can hold my hand.”

  When did I become a bumbling fool?

  “Have you never had your hand held?” Jerry teased as he took my hand in his.

  “No one usually asks,” I explained as we walked down the sidewalk. “They just do it.”

  “The first time, a man should always ask. He should ask for the first kiss, too, not just take it.”

  “What a gentleman,” I smiled teasingly.

  “Not really,” he said, looking at me with those gorgeous eyes. “I just know how to please a woman.”

  Heat rose in my face and in other places I wasn’t ready to think about.

  “But after today,” Jerry continued. “I won’t ask before I take your hand or kiss you.”

  “You’re assuming that there will be an ‘after today’,” I said.

  “What I like about your statement is that you did not say that I am assuming that you will kiss me. Now I know I have a very good chance of getting the green light on that.”

  “Because you are so damn sure of yourself, I am going to give you a red light just to be spiteful.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said, caressing my knuckles with his thumb. “You may pretend you don’t want me to kiss you, but the truth is that you do want me to kiss you.”

  “I hardly know you,” I pointed out. “Maybe I don’t like to kiss strangers on the first date.”

  “I’m hardly a stranger,” he scoffed. “Thanks to the media, people seem to know me better than I know myself.”

  “I wouldn’t know since I don’t follow soccer.”

  “Damn adorable,” he grinned at me. “Where the hell are we going? Where do you live?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because you want to invite me in so I can kiss you properly,” he said casually.

  “I don’t even know your last name or where you’re from. What the hell kind of accent is that and how do you know that when you try to kiss me I won’t knock that accent right out of your mouth?”

  “My last name is Vasquez . I was born in the Dominican Republic but moved to New Jersey when I was fourteen. Now tell me where you live.”

  “How old are you?” I asked, refusing to answer his question even though we were heading in the wrong direction.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  How many siblings do you have?”

  “You really need all of this information before a kiss?” He chuckled.

  “I didn’t say you were getting a kiss, Vasquez. How many?”

  “Two sisters and a brother. Sofia and Martina are twenty-two year old twins and Diego is a year older than me. Now about that kiss…”

  “And you get stuck with Jerry for a name?” I laugh. “Way to go.”

  “My real name is Geraldo, but my teachers kept pronouncing it wrong, so I became Jerry. Tell me where you live, princess.”

  “What are your parents’ names?” I asked.

  “Carlos and Rosa, but my mother passed last year.” He looked a little pained as he said it and I instantly felt bad, but not bad enough to tell him where I lived yet.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” I said sincerely.

  “Thank you. She was a beautiful woman, inside and out.”

  I didn’t think he wanted to dwell on that topic, so I didn’t.

  “You don’t want to know anything about me?” I asked.

  “What do you want to tell me about yourself?”

  “Oh,” I said, not knowing where to start. “Technically I am an only child, but my best friend’s family pretty much adopted me, and there are five of them. Freddy, Charlotte, Lucy, Emmet, and Emmy.” It felt awkward talking about Emmet as if he was a brother, because he so was not, but I didn’t see any point in going into that with Jerry.

  “Why did you spend so much time with them?” Jerry looked at me curiously.

  “Because my mother wasn’t much of a mother,” I said, unable to meet his eyes. “She tried to make up for it before she died, though.”

  “And did she?”

  I had never thought about whether or not she had properly made up for it, but she was dead and that was punishment enough.

  “Yes,” I answered finally.

  Jerry halted and I stumbled because he had stopped so abruptly. He steadied me easily with a hand on my waist, but he didn’t remove it even after I was clearly okay to stand on my own. He stepped in close to me, so close that I could feel his breath on my face. My own breath hitched and I wanted to look away from those killer eyes, but I couldn’t.

  “Are you going to tell me where you live, Donya, or should I kiss you here on the street?”

  “I’m not really down for the insta-love thing,” I said in a voice that didn’t match the dazed look on my face.

  “No one said anything about love, princess. It’s just a kiss.”

  “If it’s just a kiss then you can just kiss someone else, couldn’t you?”

  “But I want to kiss you,” he said in a purposely pouty voice that somehow sounded sexy.

  “I’ll tell you what, Jerry,” I said, putting a hand on the lapel of his coat. “I’ll take a cab home, alone. You can call me tomorrow and ask me out on a proper date. You can ask me for a kiss if the date goes well.”

  He groaned. “I can honestly say that you’re the first woman to so adamantly turn me down.”

  “Well, there are some things you have to work for in this world,” I said, stepping away from him. I stepped to the curb and waved for a taxi. “And I am one of them.”

  With perfect timing, a cab pulled up to the curb.

  “I don’t have your number,” Jerry said, chuckling.

  “Guess you’ll have to work for that, too,” I said and climbed into the back of the taxi.

  Most men would have been furious, or at least irritated, but when I looked back at Jerry standing on the sidewalk, I only saw his dimpled grin.

  *~*~*

  Later that night after I changed into some warm clothes, I sat on the bed with my laptop and navigated to My Space. I wasn’t really into the site, but a lot of my friends had a page that I could follow and there was a surprisingly decent amount of people that followed me. I never really had much to say or post, though. I mostly went on there to stalk Emmet. Lately he had been posting pictures of his self and a woman named Cassandra, Casey for short. There was nothing particularly damming about the photographs. They were at the beach in one, standing side by side wearing sunglasses and smiling at the camera with the sea behind them. There was another of them wearing hiking gear in some hilly region I was guessing not to be Florida since I had never seen anything but flatness during my visits there. Another of them making ridiculous faces. The one I hated the most was of the one with his arm across her shoulders and her arm around his waist. Friends posed like that all of the time, but something in
their smiles just seemed…intimate.

  I shut the laptop and twisted my hands in my lap. Whenever I spoke to Emmet, he never spoke about Casey, and it wasn’t that he had to, but the fact that he didn’t made me think he didn’t want me to know about it. He thought me to be lacking in the internet skills. He knew that I had an assistant that mostly ran my page and I typically had nothing to do with it, so of course he wouldn’t expect me to find him on the website or to scroll through everything he posted since it was made public.

  I opened the laptop again and looked at his page. In the short minutes that I had sat pondering, he had posted again. My chest tingled just knowing that he was awake and moving around down there in Florida, probably getting ready for bed. I smiled a little as I leaned in to read what he had just posted, but my smile quickly faded. He had posted another picture of him and Casey. Again, it wasn’t damming in anyway on its own, even if he was embracing her. It was the words that accompanied the photo that had me biting my fist to keep from sobbing.

  “Sometimes you have to let go of the past to embrace your future.”

  I could have been misunderstanding what he meant, but I knew it as sure as I knew that I was sitting on that bed within four walls that the past he was speaking of was me, and the future was her.

  Ironically, the closer I got to stepping away from my career over the years, the lower the odds became that Emmet and I would end up back together. The tether was ever present and like a live wire whenever we were in close proximity, but away from me, Emmet carried on with his life, to the fullest. I still had some hope, though. I couldn’t even really get involved with any other guy because I didn’t think it would be fair to them. I didn’t think I could possibly love anyone else, but it was possible for Emmet, obviously.

  I closed the laptop and put it carelessly on the floor before turning out my light and curling up under my blankets, refusing to cry myself to sleep.

  *~*~*

  At nearly one in the morning, my cell phone rang next to me on the bed. I shot up in bed when I heard the noise and stared down at it in confusion for a moment before comprehending that I was supposed to answer it. Then my heart began to race, because only a few people had my number and none of them would call me in the middle of the night unless someone was terribly sick, dying, or dead.